Of salaries and migration

Oct 10, 2009 Editorial

Things have to be bad when a country loses one of every three of its citizens to migration. What makes it worse is when two of every three qualified persons opt to migrate.
This has been the case ever since the latter years of the last century when the economic conditions began to deteriorate.
People always want a style of living that is comfortable, one in which the ordinary people can watch their children grow to become people their parents themselves had hoped to be but never became; a life that affords some recreation and leisure rather than one of constantly wondering about the next meal and the mounting bills.
The cost of living in Guyana, although people may not realise it, is relatively low. It is cheaper to live in Guyana than in many other countries but those Guyanese at home do not realise this. It is the volume of money that affects their ability to live as comfortably as they would like.
For example, people who left these shores as qualified teachers and headed to North America are earning the equivalent of between $12 million and $16 million per annum. They are financially better off than their Guyanese counterparts with more disposable income. However, that apart, the average Guyanese at home finds life less stressful that if he or she had been overseas.
Most Guyanese who live in the developed world for a prolonged period end up on some medication or the other. They live a stressful life and they worry about so many things, not least about their future, despite the volume of money they receive.
However, it is this money that Guyanese are pursuing because they know that in the long run they would have a pension and a reliable social security—money that would stand them in good stead in their later years. And this pull to migrate comes from those who have left and have settled in. The fact that this is still happening though is an indictment of the local system.
The government says that it is unable to pay higher wages without inflating the wage bill to the extent that the international donors would raise eyebrows.
Then comes the time when the social security system should provide for those who spent their best years serving the country. They are now hearing that records have been misplaced; that computations cannot now be made. And when the computations are made, inflation erodes whatever is paid to the extent that the pensioners are nothing but mendicants.
One wonders whether the time has not come for the government to arrange for skilled people to be paid wages and salaries commensurate with those skills. Over the years there has been a failure to do this to the extent that the United Nations Development Programme has taken note of the rate of migration. The UNDP has also taken note of the level of poverty—126,000 Guyanese living on $400 per day.
At the same time, the government must seek to hire skilled people from foreign lands where possible or simply forget about any project that demands a lot of skills. Of course, the private sector employs the largest percentage of skilled people but they take their cue from the government. This explains why they pay what they do.
In South Korea, Malaysia and the rest of the Asian giants, teachers are among the highest paid people. Those countries recognise that with the best teachers in place skills are assured in the future. Guyana has not recognised this, choosing instead to pay others who make precious little contributions to development what Dr Cheddi Jagan once called super salaries.
It is the same with the Guyanese nurses and doctors. But it is the teachers whose absence is most seriously felt. Guyana has all but lost the ability to produce people capable of mathematical computations and a knowledge of the sciences. In fact, the country has just about lost people who could teach. The result is that the number of functionally illiterate people keeps rising. Many of those who teach in schools are barely literate.
For all the signs, though, it is wishful thinking that there would be a change in the policy that governs wages and salaries.

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